577644 - Make the Sage feed RSS reader add-on a permanent part of Firefox

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox Graveyard :: RSS Discovery and Preview, enhancement)

Description

[Peter Lairo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; en-US; rv:2.0b2pre) Gecko/20100708 Minefield/4.0b2pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) Creative ZENcast v1.02.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; en-US; rv:2.0b2pre) Gecko/20100708 Minefield/4.0b2pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) Creative ZENcast v1.02.10

Make the Sage feed RSS reader a permanent part of Firefox.

Feed reading is an integral part of the internet and is used by many site (e.g., blogs and news sites). Firefox's current feed reading capability are so limited as to make it not worth using for any real reading of feeds. Integrating the more capable Sage feed reader would bring an important and useful part of the web to millions of users (similar to the recent integration of video capability).

The Sage feed reader add-on (as improved in Sage++) would be the ideal built-in feed reader for Firefox because it is very simple to use, it is tightly integrated into existing functionality (bookmarks), the UI is very similar to the Bookmarks Sidebar UI, and the code is highly developed.

In addition to the original Sage feed reader, there are two forked versions:

Sage:     https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/77/
Sage++:   http://himag.blog26.fc2.com/blog-entry-234.html?lang=en
Sage-Too: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/addons/7263/
          http://sage.blat.co.za/2009/02/19/resignation/

Feeds are an integral and useful part of the internet. This important functionality should not be relegated to add-ons. I hope you will consider this when deciding on the fate of this important bug. Please don't wontfix this bug without serious discussion among the developers.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Peter Lairo]

Attachment: Better Style for Sage

Here is a Sage Style I created that has some improvements over the default Sage style (e.g, respects user setting for font size and type, single column feed content). If possible, please make this style the default for the Firefox feed reader. You are free to use it and change it as you will.

Comment 2

[Dave Garrett]

I'm sorry to have to break this to you, but this is the opposite of what Firefox was created for. This bug is INVALID.

Let me explain it to you this way: Once upon a time, in the murky past where we had the bloated Mozilla Suite, things were a mess. The various components couldn't keep their schedules straight; the email reader wasn't ready at the same time as the browser and the IRC client wasn't either. There were too many features, which not everyone used, and maintenance was a mess. The solution: Firefox, Thunderbird, and addons. Make standalone applications that do exactly what they need to do, and whatever is removed you can add back as needed. Chatzilla got ripped out, and now it's an addon. This was a good thing; the programs got better. Chatzilla now can release whatever they need on their own schedule, not tied to anyone else, with developers specialized for IRC clients working on the IRC client. I'm not sure, but Sage is so old that I have a feeling that it was one of the things ripped out of the Mozilla Suite and turned into an addon to allow Firefox to be born, or at least it might be based on some of that original code.

Simply put: no addons get merged in like this, except very special little ideas. You know the addon that merged the stop and reload buttons? That idea got built in. You know the addon that lets you resize this text box I'm typing into? That idea got built in for Firefox 4. A full featured multi function feed reader isn't getting built in. It lives as an addon now, and this is a good thing.

Now, I do agree we need better discoverability for things like this. Firefox should really have some really smart way of recommending addons to people to anticipate their needs. RSS and the various feed reader addons, not just Sage, fall under this line of thought. However, that's not this bug. This bug is INVALID. Closing as such.